It's not that musicians want Apple to charge customers on their behalf, it's that musicians want Apple to pay them for Apple using their music, whatever Apple wants to do with it. There is a big difference between the two.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that didn't go for Canticle for Leibowitz. I kept reading that it was a classic, but just could never get into it. I finally gave it up about 2/3 of the way through as just too depressing.

Did you actually read the rest of the article? It said, in the sentence *immediately following the one you quote*:

"Originally conceived as a rapid, low-cost electric testbed, the effort evolved into a flying car."

Whether it IS a flying car or not (personally, I don't think so), the article at least does make the claim.

Thank you! You said pretty much what I was going to say. I learned programming back in the early 1970s in HS with Dartmouth Basic. About a 40-page "manual" that gave some of the language concepts in the context of population demographics. The first thing the teacher told us was the mailbox example. That and about an hour of reading was enough for me to understand Basic well enough to do straightforward things that I could think up. That level of Basic is *so* basic that with a little explanation almost anybody can pick it up, and if the person has someone there to answer questions and perhaps provide a few real-world examples to try out, they're all set. My own first Basic program was about 5 lines: take a number and print out all powers of the number up to six. Things like pointers and objects came later (OO was just starting to be invented.)